Oral History of Randal Bryant

Interviewed by Douglas Fairbairn, on June 16, 2014 in Mountain View, California, X7201.2014
© Computer History Museum
Randy Bryant describes his upbringing and people who influenced his early life. His grandfather and father were both professors, and his mother also had a PhD. He developed an early interest in math that he carried on to his college career at the University of Michigan. He quickly got “hooked” on computers. Upon graduation, he headed off to MIT in 1974 to pursue his PhD.
While attending MIT he was introduced to VLSI design and as a result saw the need for a high performance switch level simulator to provide functional verification of new designs. His creation, MOSSIM, became wildly popular, not only in the burgeoning university design community but in industry as well, in particular at Intel. His PhD thesis became the development of a more formal model for what had been implanted in an ad hoc fashion.
After earning his PhD, he spent some time at Caltech, but eventually settled in as a professor at Carnegie Mellon. During this time he developed the concept of Binary Decision Diagrams, or BDDs. The original paper he wrote on BDDs has become the most cited paper in computer science. This mathematical insight proved very powerful in the development of future electronic design automation (EDA) tools, including some in the area of formal verification. In addition to his academic accomplishments, he served for 10 years as the Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon until July 2014.
* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - www.computerhis...
Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.

[@mdeloura]

Go Randy!

[@ranjithmkumar]

Great Person. Love his book.

[@sbose9999]

One trick pony